At long last, others are saying the Emperor is naked. And, it's not a pretty site.

Still think your sanitized and highly polished website means much to anyone seeking a product or service such as yours? Please go to this link and read the post by Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang entitled, Voices from the Community, Websites are Irrelevant. Take his advice, too, about reading his previous post of this topic at this link.

Still, corporations go to great lengths to improve their static website analytics, principally by tweaking their key words and invoking other search engine optimizations. But even if more visitors find these websites, they are not coming there first… they're coming after they have sourced information everyplace but. After they've decided you might have something to offer, based primarily on peer comment and other sources, they come to your static website to get the party line on pricing, availability, services and so forth. Generally this is information that can be trusted because, after all, the price is the price. As for the rest of the promotional one-sided presentation on most corporate web sites — it's a waste of time and money. It's not highly credible.

Corporate websites today present as if average people don't know that products from time to time have flaws; that competitors pose problems; that from time to time someone in the corporate organization can say or do something really inappropriate. The average corporate website reads like a capitalist fairy tale… everything is wonderful; nothing is ever wrong; our products are the best for everything. Nobody believes any of that. Significantly more credible are corporations that acknowledge what everyone already knows — and that foster an honest conversation about how and why and when things can be improved.

In the absence of this, it means the typical corporate website isn't compelling anyone to buy a product… isn't drawing anyone in to the corporate tent for the traditional, highly-controlled sales pitch. Brochureware is irrelevant. Visitors are coming only to confirm what has already been more or less learned or decided from sources elsewhere.

Rather than stick with the familiar and safe — and highly controllable — wouldn't it be simpler and better and more honest to start introducing a little give and take, a wee bit of conversation and dialogue? How about a few voices from those not on the corporate payroll?

In fact, getting real is a lot harder than getting someone to help optimize a static site. Real conversation implies real risk. Good corporate conversationalists are a lot harder to find than promotional copywriters. But the alternative to solving these and other problems associated with getting real is dreadful. You write and write, happify and happify, tweak and tweak to draw a bigger and bigger crowd into your corporate arena and all that results is that more and more people come only after the ball game is over and just to catch the final score.

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